WP2 has seen a major overall and there are many many things I like about it. e.g the entire look of the admin section has improved. It is supposed to be faster. Adminstration is easier. The permalinks though troublesome are better with lesser rules being added to your .htaccess file. I also like the Presentation (themes) section which looks so much better than earlier. I am also happy they haven’t done away with Categories. Though I hope they introduce Tags as well.

However, there are a lot of things I don’t like about 2.0.

For one is the user level has been replaced by Roles. I don’t really see the entire purpose of different roles, but well the creators do. Additionally, I will admit that I don’t really care as I am the only blogger on my blog.

One thing I really really hate about WordPress 2.0 is the WYSIWYG editor. I like to be in control with the code that I use and that is something the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t let me do! I have always hated the WYSIWYG and loved the quicktags, but in the attempt by the creators to make WP more “easy to use” have completely forgotten that using the quicktags was very easy, fast and gave you complete control about what you wanted to post. Anyway, you can turn it off. But this has to be done under Users, rather than just Options.

Yet another thing I don’t like is the new Upload system. Well it’s definitely better than the one in 1.5.2 which didn’t really have a sensible uploading system. However, the new one isn’t really to great. Why? Because for one you have no choice of where you can upload. WP decides this on its own and you need a plugin (can’t remember which) to change the location. However, the files are uploaded based on year and month or similar.

Additionally, there is the whole drag and drop deal for images, which doesn’t work too well with the WYSIWYG off. Also, I don’t like the idea of auto-thumbnails and auto-pages per image. I would like a way of universally turning this off rather than for every image.

I have IImage Browser plugin installed on my Demo Blog which ensures I upload as before.

Another problem with WP2 is that a lot of plugins have broken, but I guess plugin authors can work towards that soon.

WP2 also introduced the caching system, which at one time was rather buggy. I guess they have improved, but I don’t think I will be enabling it.

I know a lot of this is personal opinion, but I guess that answers Owen’s question.

As of now I am very very happy running with 1.5.2 on my blog. Ofcourse, I am forced to use 2.0 because of my plugin and theme work. That is where the Demo Blog comes in.

Roles and capabilities are better in that they provide a more granular means of defining who can do what. Rather than making a user Level 6, and giving them all the privileges associated with Level 6, you can give one user the specific capability to \”manage comments\”, for example. Owen’s role manager plugin should facilitate this, by allowing you to create brand new roles for your specific needs.